Arcanaville

The reverse. The number with the lowest amount of error will be the highest frequency roll. And assuming that is 5x, all others should be multiples of Max/5.

I'm actually just guessing. I know that at one point some of the reward tables were described as looking like that, but the current system could be a real table (as Liquid suggests). But if it is, then all bets are off on the weights being whole numbers. Although the devs are generally loathe to use weird decimals, they could have used a spreadsheet to compute those tables, and if they did, Excel doesn't have the same reluctance to generate random decimal numbers as the devs do.

The problem is that critters don't do well with player powers, for a variety of reasons. You'd need to somehow autogenerate a custom critter using the more appropriate AE powersets with a reasonable mapping between (which doesn't always exist).

The ability to autogenerate a critter from a powers template would be really cool, as would critters that were smart enough to make that actually work, but that's not quite within the reach of the game engine just yet. There's a bunch of problems that would have to be solved just to even attempt this for which there exists no tech, but it would be pretty cool if that was possible.

It doesn't but the tech wouldn't (I believe) be too difficult to add to support it. With a new guy at the programming helm, War Witch as the new design lead, and Dr. Aeon supporting general advancement of the AE, I don't think these sorts of improvements are out of reach. Its not necessarily that they are better than the people before them, its that they are looking at this with fresh eyes and may be more willing to think about novel changes. We're catching them right at the point where they are saying "I've always wanted to do X, and now I can try to see if I can get it done."

The important thing is usually *not* how hard something is to do, the important thing is whether we can get developers inside of Paragon Studios to advocate for them.

A couple of strong advocates inside the walls beats a thousand posts by me suggesting it.

The one thing to remember is that within the context of MMO development, a year is a very short amount of time. We may not see the full impact of the new people on timescales less than that, and advocacy for improvements can take that long to reach a version of the game we can play.

Curiously enough, this is also the motto of the Accounting industry and Stalin.



That part I think they do great. Somehow they need to figure out how to keep the existing playerbase in the loop with teasers that do not dilute their ability to offer showstoppers to the press, though, and I recognize that's not easy, but that's why they get paid the big bucks.


There's always Youtube. Its not like anyone watches TV anymore anyway. Not since television became a wholly owned subsidiary of Blizzard.

If they were *really* crafty this wouldn't be necessarily true. Think about the AE, and how missions are assembled there. Suppose mission one has two objectives: capture villain and destroy device. But suppose you can usually only do one of the two. It wouldn't take quite as much work to make the arc execute mission two with whatever objective you failed to accomplish, so mission two is *either* destroy device or capture villain depending on what's left.

You can also sometimes have purely cosmetic branching that don't increase the complexity of the story but at least add some flavor to the players. You can have a mission with a beginning, three middles, and an end, and the players get to decide in what order to run the middles. Or you could have a arc in which based on the results of the first mission, the map of the second mission changes but the rest of the mission details remain relatively unchanged. Maybe if you're "doing poorly" you end up fighting the villain in a well-stocked lair, but if you're "doing well" you end up fighting the villain in a lair that is on fire with explosions going off everywhere. That sort of thing.

Its possible to build up to the level where maximal branching is possible, by starting off with mission branching that is a lot less resource intensive. Even the Choose Your Own Adventure books tried whenever possible to reuse the same pages for different trajectories. An MMO can do that a lot less overtly than a fixed book can.

Perhaps the best way to describe this technology is not branching missions, but scripted missions. Sort of a super-AE with if/then statements in its modules.

To me, the real problem was City of Villains is really just a reskinned City of Heroes. It has not that different of a relationship to CoH as the Korean version of CoH had to CoH. I recognize why that was done, and I recognize that attempting anything else would have taken five times as long, but I think CoV was a lost opportunity to engineer totally different gameplay for the villains, which would have made the red side something more than just "the red side."

To me, heroes are reactive and villains are proactive, which subverts the attempt to use identical gameplay mechanics. What I would have liked to see is a more "Dungeon Keeper" approach to CoV: villains start off as small-time villains but eventually rise to criminal masterminds (you know what I mean) that engineer large scale plots that the game throws ever increasingly tough heroes at until the villain is eventually vanquished and has to launch a new plan. Villains always have to "lose" eventually, but "lose" is a relative term: they could escape prison, they could kill a beloved hero before making their escape, they could leave an entire dimension lifeless with their ultimate weapon.

I think that would have added a lot more to this game than just a red-skinned hero game with nastier contact text.

Just to add what I can here, if the drop system works the way Positron described reward tables working generally in I9, weights can be different between reward tables because the weight is not an intrinsic element of the drop, but rather just the number of entries in the table the drop possesses.

I'm assuming everyone is assuming the reward tables are still constructed that way, and that is the premise behind the assumption that all reward multipliers have to be whole numbers.

Not to get too far off on a tangent (and I've said this before, just not recently) passive defenses should have always been the strong powers, and toggles the weak ones. What the devs focused on was endurance balancing, but that's the least important factor.

What is important is that passives can't be turned off, but toggles can: you can be endurance drained to zero, you can be mezzed, you can be detoggled. So every character with a defensive set can be in one of two states: passives, or passives + toggles. That's it. So the best thing to do is to make sure that when a character is detoggled, the right amount of protection comes off. And the right amount of protection is not "basically all."

Consider SR (its the easiest to consider in this case). Fully slotted with SOs, Sr has about 30.4% defense to melee, ranged, and AoE. With only the passives, its about 8.8% defense. With only the toggles, its about 21.6% defense. In terms of survivability, knocking out the toggles increases incoming damage by 110% - more than double. If it were possible to knock out only the passives, incoming damage would increase by only 45%. That's a lot more survivable.

In fact, if 75% of your protection came from passives and only 25% from toggles, on a survival adjusted basis (to give you an idea, that would imply the toggles would be offering about 4.9% defense *slotted*) then detoggling and mezzing would be much more reasonable. Instead, its almost a death sentence in many cases, and therefore the playerbase rightly dismissed detoggling as a viable game mechanic.

If you combine this with a linear returns mitigation mechanic (similar to the one that Champions Online uses for resistance, actually) then you wouldn't have soft-capping issues complicating matters, and people would not be able to exploit strong passives by skipping the toggles altogether.

Which is the objection to this idea: if the passives are so strong, won't the players skip the toggles altogether? And my reply is: since the toggles are so strong now, why don't the players always skip the passives now? And the answer should be obvious to the devs: because the game is balanced with them taking most of those powers on average. You can walk around with 21% defense if you want with only the toggles, or you can have 30% defense with the passives and be about twice as survivable. That's not much of an option.

Furthermore, if the players *do* decide to take just half the set, doesn't it make more sense to give the players the option to take just the passive half? After all, they are sacrificing half the set's protection: are you going to force them to eat all of its endurance costs anyway?

It makes a lot more sense to say, in effect, the first half is free, and the second half costs (end). Because then there's actually a valid endurance choice: do you want to pay more for more. But instead, the game offers this choice: you must pay endurance for the baseline protection, and if you want more, its free. That actually ironically trivializes the choice of managing endurance, because you have to pay it no matter what, so why skip the zero-cost protection powers?


Bah, I feel like the Nostalgia Critic reviewing City of Heroes.

And when you hit them with knockback powers, they would break open and candy would spill out.

Well, in my dream I would code them to just kill you. Everyone else gets to be alive with one less power for a couple of seconds.

(Although, in this dream passives would be stronger than toggles, but that's another story about how the original devs broke defenses, messed up mez, and made sure the playerbase would never allow any creativity in foe effects other than various color-coded versions of death.)

1. Traditionally, resistance members do not advertise that they are members of the resistance by attacking everything in sight that is not the resistance. Darwinian selection eliminates the few that do.

2. There's also the massive numbers of robotic/android/whatever Clockwork probably programmed, ED209-style, to make you comply with the city ordinances against using superpowers to make a general nuisance of yourself or litter the sidewalk with your blood and brain matter.

I have a dream. And in this dream, I get programming to add the tech that allows an attack to execute a SetMode that suppresses a random power of the target for a specified length of time. And in this dream, sappers get that power.

Unfortunately, having delivered that ultimatum in Korean, NCSoft accidentally told Positron via Babelfish to start taking dance lessons while increasing his charitable contributions. This opened the door for War Witch to wrest command of Paragon Studios from Brian Clayton, who was too busy playing Modern Warfare 2 to notice.

Castle, seeing that his once loyal servants, Synpase and Sunstorm, were no longer worshiping him as a god, began secretly conducting experiments in the basement of Paragon Studios' offices, the singular goal of which was to create an army of undead followers bent on usurping the throne.

BaB stumbled upon his unholy lair and was consumed. A hollow apparition now roams the halls, its flailing spasmotic lurches a stark contrast to the smooth animations it still produces as if by reptilian instinct. However, the mindless husk no longer has the capacity for forum conversation, and is now forced to use the only form of communication compatible with its now animalistic nature: twitter.

Meanwhile, within the interdimensional warp which houses the texture and costume department...

Yeah, its weird: the way the article is written the article seems to be suggesting that its obvious the NVIDIA architecture is superior, but don't feel pity for ATI because they might catch up someday. That's a bit of cognitive dissonance, because the reverse is true: ATI's architecture seems to have the performance high-ground, and it is Fermi that has to catch up ground for NVIDIA.

Although he has a point that the architectures can be misleadingly compared when it comes to things like shaders, unfortunately the reality of the situation is that the 5870 beats the 285 in most of cases, contrary to the undertone of the article, and undermining the point. 5870 performance is actually in between the 285 and the 295. Clearly, that "bulky code" the article is referring to mostly exists in HPC environments, not gaming.

Some people have the reverse reaction. On what basis do you recommend that the devs choose which of the two groups of players to satisfy.

I am, of course, extending to you the benefit of the doubt that you are fully aware that those other players exist and have an equally reasonable perspective, and that therefore when you imply that pleasing you specifically is not an unreasonable goal, that you have a way to determine that it is a more reasonable goal than pleasing others. Because if that is not true, the alternative is much less laudable.

That part I agree with in the main. The part I disagreed with was the part where what the business operator's wants shouldn't factor in at all. Regardless of whether you think the customer is always right, its not true that the customer should always win.

My main point was that when a business sticks to its guns even in the face of public (or customer) opposition, whether that is perceived to be integrity or stupidity seems to be a highly subjective thing.

I doubt it, but if it is you have my permission to voice a reasonable level of discontent.

Are you saying that if the devs don't have time to add something for old players, they shouldn't even release the event again for the new players?

We veteran players should be getting new things regularly, but I personally don't need every single thing being done for the newer players to have to have some form of treat for me whose sole purpose is to bribe me into not complaining about it.

I'm guessing that Going Rogue has at least one or two new things for us veteran players. Maybe more, but I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much.

Hold the Mvustard.

Its not that simple. Suppose you discover that you could open a McDonalds and serve lots of customers and make them happy and get rich doing it, but what you want to do is make a small Mediterranean lunch counter that would probably serve a quarter of the customers and you'd make a decent living but that's what you really feel passionate about and there are no other Mediterranean eating places within a hundred miles, so the few customers you do serve are not being served by anyone else at the moment.

Is it better to do what makes more money? Is that the singular purpose of being in business? Are the people who want a Mediterranean dining establishment not as important as the four times as many people that want a McDonalds?

Game design - like all businesses - is a balance between serving "the customer" and doing what you want and hoping there *are* customers.

Perspective is interesting. Jack gets hammered for wanting to follow a game design vision, even though it might be sometimes contrary to the players. Michael Bay is often reviled for the opposite reason: he gives the viewing public what he thinks they want to see, and his ticket numbers suggest he's right much of the time. It is almost never about vision or catering: its about whether you agree with the final result that determines your judgment of the philosophy that got them there.



** Technically, the baseline thing that everyone has in common is the greatest common factor, not the lowest common denominator. The lowest common denominator is the thing that includes everything that everyone possibly wants all together. The people on the bus in Speed are the lowest common denominator. I'm never going to be comfortable using these terms as the general public does, meaning exactly precisely the opposite of what they actually mean.